The floors in commercial and industrial buildings get dirty with use and require periodic cleaning, so various cleaning machines have been developed and are available for this purpose. Aisles and corridors are often cleaned with a battery powered scrubber which has one or more scrub brushes or pads, tanks for clean and dirty scrub water and a vacuum pickup shoe or squeegee. A rigid pickup shoe is generally used when cleaning carpet, while a pickup squeegee with flexible lips is needed when cleaning hard floors such as tile or concrete.
Many off-aisle areas are too small for passage of these machines, and areas under counters, furniture, etc. are also inaccessible to them. Hand held equipment has evolved for cleaning these less accessible and smaller areas. Commonly this will be a tubular wand of a convenient length for a standing operator to hold and reach to the floor. The lower end will be connected to some sort of cleaning head. These heads vary in design. Some are only a vacuum pickup nozzle. Others add a floor brush to the vacuum pickup. This brush may be stationary, requiring manual pushing, or it may rotate or oscillate under power. Some cleaning heads spray cleaning solution on the floor and pick it up with the vacuumized air, and may or may not have a brush. In all these cases the upper end of the wand will be attached to a hose which is connected to a source of vacuumized air and either a wet or a dry debris receptacle, and it may also be connected to a smaller hose which supplies it with pressurized cleaning solution. The wand will comprise a rigid main tube which carries the vacuumized air from the scrub head, and in a design using cleaning solution the wand will also have a smaller tube along its length to carry the solution to the scrub head.
We are concerned here with a scrub head for use with a wand, the scrub head being of the type which has a powered rotating tool such as a brush or pad to scrub and loosen soilage on a floor or other surface. It is supplied at the will of the operator with pressurized cleaning solution, which is most commonly water to which a detergent has been added, and it has means for applying the solution to the floor, for example, a spray nozzle. It also has a vacuumized pickup shoe or squeegee. Such scrub heads commonly have an electric motor to drive the rotating tool. This motor makes the scrub head heavy, and since it is on the end of a rather long wand an operator must make a substantial and fatiguing effort to operate it. A electric motor also adds substantially to the cost of a scrub head and potentially can create an electric shock hazard. Prior art squeegee lips are also candidates for improvement. They are typically rather complex assemblies of rubber strips and metal retainers held together by screws. These shortcomings of prior art scrub heads are addressed by the present invention.